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Shared Darkness

A Communal Life in Film, Examined

Daily Archives: October 23, 2007

30 Days of Night

The same reason that I could never be a habitual smoker is the same reason that I wouldn’t make a good big screen vampire.
This occurred to me while watching 30 Days of Night, the latest adapted entry in Hollywood’s favorite source material of the moment, the graphic novel. The film’s
vampires are really inefficient when one gets right down to it. After
all, if it’s blood one craves, why would you puncture a jugular, enjoy
only a quick pint (or less) in orgiastic fashion, and then simply leave
the body? This, to me, seems terribly wasteful — the genre equivalent
of lighting a cigarette and flipping it away or stubbing it out after a
quick, single drag. While 30 Days of Night doesn’t exactly encourage such pause
for thought, the fact that I had time to reflect on such matters is
indicative of how at least somewhat botched a rendering of a great
concept the movie is.

It’s a time of hunkered-down communal survival,
with liquor and beer taps turned off at the local bar in order to temper tempers. Relishing this
free rein, a group of bloodthirsty vampires, led by Danny Huston,
arrive to take advantage of the situation by feeding on the helpless
residents. It’s up to Sheriff Eben Olemaun (Josh Hartnett, above right), his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George, above center) and an ever-shrinking group of survivors to do everything they can to
last until the next daylight. If this means going Anne Frank and holing
up in an attic to much bickering discord, so be it.

30 Days of Night is directed, improbably enough, by David Slade, who most recently made the indie two-hander Hard Candy. As in that film, Slade trades heartily in tight close-ups, though of
course dialing down the color saturation to play up the surrounding
darkness. Early on, this tack suits the material, as the movie is a quickened-pace, Dawn of the Dead-style
re-imagining of pure, streamlined genre material, with its vampires
swooping around in quick bursts and speaking in a subtitled dialect of
phonetic clicks and high-pitched shrieks. Much more an exercise in
horror than action, the movie dashes through its moral quandary
checklist — a violent attack by an infected kid, the assisted suicide
of another infected person — and gets some of its ya-yas out via the
group assault of a young woman used, to no avail, as bait to try to
lure humans out from hiding.

Diehard vampire aficionados and source text fans will appreciate much of the film, and it definitely earns points for a bleak ending that doesn’t try to have it both ways. Still, 30 Days of Night remains essentially a somewhat
shrug-inducing vessel of unfulfilled potential, consisting of solidly
executed attack passages followed by great stretches of relative
tedium, or at least overly familiar genre dawdling (the waylaid
re-supply trip, the infected survivor). The great potential of its concept (“We should have come up here ages
ago!” even one of the vampires admits) never takes full bloom,
partially because of wanly sketched supporting characters, but chiefly
because the restrictive conditions of space and passing time are
communicated in such a fuzzy, haphazard fashion. For the full review, from FilmStew, click here.

Michael Caine: Lessons from a Master

Over the course the course of his career of almost half a century,
Michael Caine has, by his own estimation, been the lead in 80 to 85 movies —
this on top of nine years of near-exclusive work in the theater. So when the
actor — now 74, but still sprightly and intellectually playful — holds forth on
the differences between comedy and drama, or Hollywood then and now, it’s with
a considerable insight born of a unique combination of talent and experience. If
it seems like Caine could conduct a master class on acting, it’s not without
good reason; in fact, he already has, in the form of a best-selling DVD called Acting in Film.

Master Class on BBC2, which is the more esoteric channel,”
recalls Caine in a recent one-on-one interview, “and they asked me
for two years to do this thing on cinema. But I said, ‘I
don’t know how to tell you anything about it. I could do movie acting of a
certain standing, but I don’t know how to tell you how to do it.’ They said
well why don’t you try? So they gave me four cameras and four young actors, all
of whom were doing my roles in the theater — it was Sleuth, Educating Rita, Alfie and one other. And so
they then did their stage performance, and I had to change it to a movie
performance, and that’s what I did. That’s sold lots of copies in America,
and it’s just been released in England
and is doing very well there. …There are some good tricks in
there that one can use.”

They’re tricks that have continued to serve Caine well throughout
his own career, even though his theater work — something a lot of younger
actors of today lack — gives him a rooting and structure that he finds
invaluable, especially in comedy. “I can’t think of how you do comedy in a
movie without the sense memory and timing of a live audience,” Caine says. “No
one can laugh in the studio. So I will deliberately rehearse in front of the
unit to see whether they laugh at certain things, and I’ll do it very loud. But
if you’re doing it for the camera and the crew laughs, then you’re doing it too
big.”

“Big” is just the opposite of Caine’s latest film, Sleuth, a slick, slippery,
intimate two-hander in which he, a cuckolded novelist, and Jude Law, a
struggling actor, wage psychological warfare against one another, all in the
pursuit of a woman. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Caine played Law’s
role, opposite Laurence Olivier, in a 1972 production from filmmaker Joseph
Mankiewicz. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this Sleuth is a from-the-basement-up re-imagining of its
concept, rewritten and reconceived from Anthony Shaffer’s stageplay by legendary
scribe Harold Pinter. Caine, for one, is tickled pink over the chance to tackle
the role he always regarded as best anyway. “I like this part, it’s a good part,”
he says with a grin. “I don’t want to play the other one — anyway, Jude’s
prettier than I am. It would be very hard to do a story where I took a wife
away from Jude, you see what I mean?”

For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for Caine’s thoughts on The Dark Knight, click here.

On Tom Perrotta, Birthdays, Hotel Chevalier

Writers Digest has up a solid interview with Tom Perrotta, the author of Little Children, in which he talks about his writing process, as well as his adaptation of The Abstinence Teacher, which he’s working on for Little Miss Sunshine co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Ferris.

Also, surprising exactly no one in the know, the New York Times is reporting that when The Darjeeling Limited, which opened in about 200 theaters in late September, expands nationwide this Friday,
moviegoers will first see a short film, Hotel Chevalier, which distributor Fox Searchlight hopes will boost ticket sales. The thematically linked piece, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, is available online, and was originally not going to be shown with the film. At the movie’s press day in Los Angeles a couple weeks ago, though, director Wes Anderson admitted that it would be pegged to later prints of the movie.

And finally, it’s happy birthday wishes today to Ryan Reynolds and Ang Lee, who turn 31 and 53, respectively.

Some Depressing Transformers News…

So if there wasn’t enough troubling news in the world, now comes word that Transformers has sold 8.3 million DVDs in North America alone since its debut on October 16, with 4.5 million of those coming in a single day. After pulling in over $315 million domestically at the box office ($700 million-plus worldwide), the movie has already become the top-selling October DVD release of all time, as well as the best-selling HD-DVD ever, with 190,000 copies of the latter now sitting on coffee tables next to recently popped copies of Halo 3 and Maxim Magazine.

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